Software Freedom Conservancy launches lawsuit against Vizio
TV manufacturer accused of GPL infringement.
The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) organisation (https:// sfconservancy.org) is suing TV manufacturer Vizio over what it claims are “repeated failures to fulfil even the basic requirements of the General Public License (GPL).” Vizio, a popular TV brand in the US, uses a smart TV platform called SmartCast, which the SFC alleges “contain software that Vizio unfairly appropriated from a community of developers who intended consumers to have very specific rights to modify, improve, share, and reinstall modified versions of the software.”
While the SFC’s lawsuit isn’t looking for monetary damages, it “seeks access to the technical information that the copyleft licenses require Vizio to provide to all customers who purchase its TVs.” You can see the full lawsuit complaint at https://bit.ly/lxf283sfccomplaint.
According to the SFC, the non-profit organisation – which includes Debian Copyright Aggregation Project, Git, Wine and more – first contacted Vizio in August 2018, but by January 2020, Vizio stopped communicating with it. The SFC wants Vizio to share any source code it uses for the SmartCast software “in a format that may be compiled without undue difficulty.” If this happened, the aim would be to help continue supporting Vizio TVs after the company no longer supports them with open source firmware. The open source community could also work on creating new firmware for these TVs, similar to how the OpenWrt project (https://openwrt.org) tackles embedded devices and routers.
According to the lawsuit, Smartcast uses code made by BusyBox, along with libraries such as ffmpeg and Systemd, which are all licenced under GPL. SmartCast is based on Linux, and that “multiple copies of the Linux kernel appear in the firmware.” It sounds like Vizio needs to ensure its software complies with GPL, and it’ll be interesting to see how it responds.